Leopard Story

We were watching the sun set when we heard lions roaring from a thicket about a hundred meters from the road.

We all got excited at the prospect of seeing them and were about to wait patiently for them to appear when I heard on the radio that a leopard had just been spotted just round the corner from where we were. I talked it over with my guests, we decided to try and find the leopard since no one had seen one before.

However, when we got there we just got a glimpse of her disappearing into some bushes surrounded by an open plain. We waited for about 5 minutes and decided to go round to the other side of the plain to try a different angle. When we got there it was dark so I was using the spotlight to search the plain, we could see a couple of springbok grazing ignorantly about 10 meters from the road. The beam of the spotlight spun round the plain behind them and we saw the leopard lying flat staring intently at the springbok. I quickly switched of the spotlight as to not ruin her camouflage. In the moonlight you could see the outline of the springbok standing completely unaware just a few meters from us and the light patch in the grass which marked the stalking leopard.

Everybody was totally silent as to not alert either of them. In a flash of movement the leopard ran and pounced on the springbok pulling it down. I quickly put the spotlight back on the pair, I was expecting noise but there was no sound at all. She was only a young female, the springbok looked bigger then she was, she lay there for a few minutes holding it by the throat in her jaws. There was a long pause before the other springbok realized what was happening.

At this point the other plains game became alert, and started to snort along with the whistling springbok, and then we could hear the two lions from earlier roaring in the background. Finally she let go of the lifeless body and was panting to get her strength back, she did this for about ten minutes whilst licking her prize and grunting.

A couple of jackals appeared on the scene and were sniffing around and wailing to each other. None of us in the car could believe what we were experiencing. As we discussed the sighting she stood up and started looking around. We all realized that she was probably going to move her kill as she was out in the open being pestered by the jackals and the lions were so close.

She picked it up by the throat and started dragging it beneath her, away from us across the plain, making load grunts of exertion. It was quite a slow progress and she stopped every ten meters or so to breath and look around her. When she was in the middle of the plain we drove round to the other side this was about 300meters from where she had originally killed.

We could see her coming so we sat near her path and waited watching her laborious journey. Eventually she pulled it on the road in front of us dropping it to study her surroundings, she was tired but the lions were still roaring close by so she needed to get it to relative safety of the deep thicket on the other side of the road. She bent down and finished dragging it across the road and started to disappear into the vegetation beside us.

Eventually we could no longer see her, we could just hear the rustling as she was moving away, leaving us completely overwhelmed.

Becca